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Yorkshire grit is an abrasive paste formulated to give a fine keyed surface to your woodturning projects, prior to applying your finish of choice.
A hand blended mix of mineral oil, lemon oil, beeswax, rotten stone and pumice designed to give your woodturning the perfect foundation for finishing.
Yorkshire Grit is manufactured in the United States by Easy Wood Tools.
Yorkshire grit is an abrasive paste formulated to give a fine keyed surface to your turnings, prior to applying your finish of choice. It consists of pharmaceutical grade ingredients, including mineral oil, beeswax and ultra fine grinding powders. These are then carefully blended (without the use of solvents or other strong smelling and potentially harmful chemicals) to produce a creamy abrasive paste. Yorkshire Grit acts like ‘liquid sandpaper’, reducing the scratches left by the initial dry sanding* and eliminating the increasingly fine dust produced by traditional sanding at higher grits. On most woods sanding up to 240 grit is sufficient to start with our paste. The grinding powders we use are designed to break down to a finer mesh as they are used, while still maintaining a cutting edge, so as the friction reduces the mesh size of the grit it is effectively forming a finer abrasive. In comparison tests we believe the finish is at least equivalent to 1000 grit.
As a keen woodturner the inventor was always striving for that flawless finish, be it satin, gloss or that “dipped in glass” look. Experience has taught me that preparation is everything; You only have to watch French Polishers in action to have something to aspire to. We don’t generally take the time to slowly build the finish to a glass like surface as they do, but some of the methods and processes can be incorporated into our lathe finishing techniques.
* The science bit… As light shines on the surface of the wood, rays of light get trapped in tiny surface scratches, so some light does not bounce / reflect back off effectively. These tiny scratches are invisible to the human eye; the deeper the tiny scratches are the lower the sheen, hence the shallower, or shorter, the scratch the more light is reflected off the surface. Yorkshire Grit removes, or greatly reduces, the size of these tiny scratches resulting in more reflected light bouncing back off the surface giving you the ultimate foundation for whichever wax or oil based final finish you choose.
